All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (17 page)

his freckled ass cheeks, and looked back over his shoulder, smiling. I popped open one of my mini tubes of lube and started greasing up his ass. He wiggled his butt as my fingers moved around and I could see goose pimples pop up on his skin. I took the female condom—a sandwich bag-looking thing with a plastic ring in it—and slowly worked it in with my fingers. He moaned and started playing with his cock. I moved my fingers in and out, in and out, faster and faster, and used my other hand to jerk my cock. We stayed like this for what could've been ten minutes or just about ninety seconds. It all happened in sex time, where things speed up, slow to a crawl, and sometimes suspend entirely in ways that have nothing to do with what's going on with the clock.

When it was over and we were spent, we wiped ourselves off with our towels and exchanged some completely innocuous but good-natured small talk. It felt less like we had just had sex than like we were running buddies and had just completed one of our weekly runs. We got dressed, dropped our used towels in the big dirty towel bin by the door, and walked out to the street together. I thought about giving him a hug before we parted but decided against it. As we headed to our respective cars, we both agreed that "it was fun."

I got home and told Seth all about it, every moment, every detail. I felt that I could win some goodwill points by at least being completely honest. My best hope was that he wouldn't think finger fucking some guy with a female condom was all that big of a deal, but I left myself open for the possibility that he might be really pissed at me for a while. What I didn't expect was that he'd start crying and keep crying for hours. No matter how I tried to assure him that what happened had nothing to do with my feelings for him, he wouldn't stop sobbing. As I reluctantly fell into sleep, the sound of him crying was still in my ears. The next morning, he canceled his classes at school and spent the day in bed. That evening, he asked me to move out.

His request shocked me. I couldn't believe that what was so insignificant in my mind had led him to such a life-changing decision. Why couldn't he be cool with this like he had been with everything else? Where was my second chance?

We spent the next few days not really speaking except when absolutely necessary, as I went about looking for a new place to live and he took extraordinary efforts to be home as little as possible, staying late at the school library and catching up with friends he hadn't seen in years. But even though we didn't talk, we still managed to communicate, most effectively through Mariah Carey's latest CD,
Butterfly.
I repeatedly played the title track and would loudly sing along to the lyrics: "Wild horses run unbridled / Or their spirit dies." Seth would then walk to the CD player and calmly advance the disc four tracks to "Breakdown."

As the song played, I'd hear him singing from another room, "So what do you do when / somebody you're so devoted to / Suddenly just stops loving you / And it seems they haven't got a clue." This back-and-forth duel with Mariah spoke loads about our relationship. We were similar in so many ways, yet far apart in others, the same artist singing two different songs.

"So this is what you really want?" I asked him early the next Saturday morning, a U-Haul packed with my boxes waiting in the parking lot outside.

"Can you say that you're never going to have sex with another guy again?" he asked, looking up, his red eyes meeting mine.

"I want to be able to say that. I really do. But I'm not sure that I can. It wouldn't be the truth. And I don't want to lie to you. I've never lied to you."

Seth paused, looked away, and said, "I think this is the best thing."

We were at an impasse—the first in seven years that we weren't able to get around together.

I moved into an apartment in downtown D.C. and started experiencing a number of things I'd been so curious about trying: picking up a hot guy at a club, bringing him home, programming some of Madonna's slower stuff on the multidisc CD player ("Shoo-Bee-Doo" from
Like a Virgin,
"Inside of Me" and "Forbidden Love" from
Bedtime Stories
), and hungrily learning the secrets of a new body.

But, at the same time, I missed Seth and a lot of things about being in a relationship, like the sense that I belonged to someone and that we were building a life together. I didn't know how to reconcile this with my growing need for independence, with the feeling that this might be my last chance to find out who I am on my own terms.

I also quickly learned something else I hadn't quite expected: how friggin' expensive it was to live alone. My rent was more than what Seth and I had been paying combined, and all the other bills that I was used to splitting— phone, cable, and the rest—I now had to handle on my own. My entire paycheck would be spent by the time I got it, so despite the new job, where I was supposed to be a role model and representative of one of the most prestigious AIDS organizations in the country, I had to secretly return to the one thing I knew could bring me fast money: stripping.

19

Once I started dancing again, there was a Redd Foxx joke that often ran through my mind. A sofa salesman says to a woman at a bar, "If the furniture business don't get no better, I'm gonna lose my ass." The woman turns to the man and says, '"Well, if the ass business don't get no better, I'm gonna lose my furniture."

This perfectly summed up my situation. I was no longer baring my ass as a way to experience something different or to discover something about myself and my sexuality. This was all about rent, the electric bill, the phone bill, the cable bill, the gym membership (a luxury for some, but an urban gay male essential), groceries, restaurant takeout, books, CDs, and clothes—in other words, the life to which I'd become accustomed, only now I had to make it work all on my own.

I decided to start back at the Follies, even though I knew that dancers at the other clubs were making good money again now that customers had resigned themselves to the permanence of "The Rule." But I once again needed the anonymity of the Follies, which was still a "You don't tell and I won't tell" kind of place. I couldn't risk being discovered because I was certain I'd lose my job if anyone at the clinic found out I was stripping. I knew that the clinic was too big a public organization to risk the bad PR of having its head of gay outreach booty-shaking for tips at the local porn house.

The surprising and unexpected thing about becoming a stripper again, however, was that in many ways it made me more effective at reaching others about the clinic's services. Before, when I walked through the club with my bag of rubbers, I was dismissed—albeit playfully—as Condom Boy. But now that I was stripping again, I had other strippers and even customers come up to me all the time asking for condoms or info about HIV and STD testing. One time, another dancer pulled me into a corner and whipped out his dick, which had a dime-sized purple blister to the left of his pee hole. "Do you think this is something I should get looked at?" he asked as I tried to pop my eyes back into my head.

I told Seth—whom I still spoke to about once a week— that stripping was making me better at my job, but he responded, irritated, "Craig, you would still be stripping even if it wasn't." I wouldn't have admitted it to him, but he was right. He generally was when it came to stuff that was going on with me, and that's why I still needed him in my life. I was determined for us to find some way to maintain a friendship. So I called him regularly to tell him how broke I was and generally how sucky my life had become. I figured that on some level, he must enjoy hearing about my hard times, and it was the least I could do to keep him updated.

The truth was that things had taken a turn for the shitty. In my new apartment, I hung up a photo that I cut out of the
Washington Post
of R&B singer Mary J. Blige consoling her friend rapper Lil' Kim at the funeral of Kim's ex-boyfriend the Notorious B.I.G. The things I was going through were in no way equivalent to their experience, but I could still relate to the sense of loss, the awareness that something was gone and things would never be the same.

I wasn't even enjoying having sex anymore, yet I was hooking up constantly. For the first time, I even got together with other dancers. One Sunday I was working with a choirboy-faced dancer named Glen, who'd just gotten out of prison for drunk driving and pot possession. We went back to my apartment and fucked between every set. It was fun, but it wasn't half as enjoyable as that woozy feeling I used to get around Mikey and other dancers that I had nursed crushes on. The problem was that it was harder to crush on people when you were actually available to act on those feelings. There was no more mystery. Sex had taken on a harder edge.

One night I picked up a flight attendant at Secrets and we raced back to his hotel and got wasted on mini bottles of vodka that he'd lifted from his last flight. (I'd also started drinking since the breakup. It was another new thing I was trying.) I pounded his ass so hard that my crotch was sore for days. I felt the way I did when I strained a muscle at the gym. Sex had become sport. It was all stamina and endurance and pushing beyond my limits. But I missed the days when it used to be fun.

I wasn't taking much pleasure in anything, especially stripping. Where working for twelve hours at the Follies used to feel like a day at a kinky day camp, it now was torturous—not quite a bamboo shoot in the penis, but irritating, like water constantly dripping on my head. And none of my old hanging buddies like Danny or Mikey were around anymore. Like so many other dancers, they just disappeared from the scene.

One Sunday night around 11
PM
, I was sitting in the Follies lobby killing time before the midnight show. I couldn't wait to finish up, go home, shower, and try to get some sleep before I had to get up in time to make it to the clinic by 9
AM.

My eyes were staring at the TV, which was showing the local evening news. Red-and-blue lights were flashing on a darkened street. Yellow crime scene tape stretched between streetlamps. I couldn't hear what was going on, but the message was clear: somebody somewhere wouldn't be seeing tomorrow.

As I watched the screen, I heard the click of the circular entrance bar. In walked Dave, who I hadn't seen in a couple of months. This was odd since I used to run into him just about every weekend.

I gave him a nod and he came over and sat next to me. We didn't shake hands, hug, or do any of the other things that friends or even close acquaintances do when greeting each other. We never did these things. I hadn't thought about it before, but suddenly this struck me as odd. Over the years, Dave had probably spent hours with my dick in his hand, and I knew all sorts of details about his sex life, past and present. Yet we never touched, even casually, unless I was dancing and he was tipping. Those were the unspoken rules, and we were veterans at the game.

"Hey, stranger," I said. "Where have you been?"

He laughed. 'Well, for one, Peter hasn't been around," he said.

"Yeah, I haven't seen him in a while, but you know how it is. Guys come and go. Then they come back again. Then go again. And so on and so on."

"What about you? You're back dancing?"

"Yep. I needed the cash."

"Are you still at the clinic?"

"Yeah, but ssshhh," I said, putting my finger over my mouth. "I've been dancing again for a few weeks now and thought it was weird that I hadn't seen you."

"Well, for a while, I was seeing somebody."

"Really?A dancer?"

"No, just a regular guy. It wasn't that serious. Just sort of hanging out. We'd try to get together on weekends, but if for some reason we didn't, it was no big deal. We kept it real casual. But then one day out of the blue, he asked if I'd be interested in a one-on-one, monogamous-type relationship."

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I had to tell him that it wasn't going to work for me. I mean, he's a wonderful person, very nice. Let's say I was sick and got AIDS or something and needed somebody to take care of me; I think that he would do that. He's that kind of guy."

"So, what's the problem?"

Dave paused a moment and leaned back on the couch. "Well, he's forty, and that's way out of my normal range. It's just the way it is for me. I mean, a guy can be responsible, have a good job, and be a very kind person. But if he's over, say, twenty-five, it ain't gonna fly. I might like him as a friend. But I won't want to keep having sex with him because I won't be able to keep getting a hard-on. It's that simple."

"You broke up with him?"

"We didn't have that kind of relationship. We just stopped doing it."

"And now you're back to your familiar turf," I said, trying to lighten things a little.

"No, that was a couple of months ago, but I still haven't been out that much. The last few times I was out, I didn't really have a good time. I don't know. I left thinking, This is superficial. This is extremely superficial. These guys don't give a shit about you. They just want your money.'"

Hearing this from Dave surprised me. He always said that the clubs gave him almost everything he was looking for in terms of sex and companionship. But something had changed.

"Look at our relationship," he continued. "I think you like me and I certainly like you. And whenever we see each other, we always have a nice conversation; and if I haven't seen you in a while, I think, I haven't seen Craig around lately.' But that's where it stops. I don't know anything else about you. I don't even know your last name. I couldn't have called you if I needed some help or just wanted to get in touch or whatever. It all stops here, and that's what I mean by superficiality."

I didn't know what to say. I felt a little attacked. It was like Dave was breaking a contract or something. I did genuinely like him and enjoyed talking to him. But what we had at the clubs was enough for me. Was that wrong?